{"id":14494,"date":"2023-02-09T11:03:44","date_gmt":"2023-02-09T11:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=14494"},"modified":"2023-02-09T11:03:44","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T11:03:44","slug":"interview-on-the-liffey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2023\/02\/09\/interview-on-the-liffey\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview On The Liffey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan O\u2019Brien of City Kayaking says they began taking litter out of the River Liffey ten years ago. In that time he\u2019s seen a change in the river.<\/span><\/p>\n

City Kayaking was launched in order to offer people access to water activities in Dublin, but in the beginning there was a lot of what we used to call \u2018legacy litter\u2019 in the Liffey. It would have wildlife underneath it, or bottles would be full of barnacles. We don\u2019t get that anymore. All the litter now comes out pretty clean, quite new. In the summer we take it out so quickly because we\u2019re on the river so often. A McDonald\u2019s bag will blow into the river and we\u2019ll get it out before it\u2019s even wet.\u00a0 <\/i>Whereas ten years ago people got used to looking at a lot of trash when they saw the Liffey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Today Jonathan pulls cans, plastic bottles and a few take away containers from the water while motoring up the river. \u2018<\/b>Small amounts of effort every day go a long way,\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

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The presence of Styrofoam is a recurring issue. Jonathan doesn\u2019t know where it comes from, but he says it is as common as the seagulls: \u2018there\u2019s no pattern to it. It\u2019s just there.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Jonathan reckons most of the litter comes from the city itself, from along the quays, the boardwalk and new Dockland developments:<\/p>\n

We can very easily predict where rubbish is going to be. Daily cleanups are just part of our routine now when guiding kayaking tours. For us, removing litter is a small step to leave the river cleaner than we found it. We\u2019re also chipping away at negative perceptions people may have of the Liffey.<\/i><\/p>\n

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\n<\/i><\/p>\n

Sadly, Jonathan has encountered little expertise in Dublin City Council for managing this waterway: \u2018I don\u2019t see a department in there who are getting their teeth stuck in.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jonathan and his colleague Jamie have also been conducting tests on behalf of Dublin City University to monitor water quality. Over the past few years they have measured elevated levels of phosphate and nitrate, which washes downstream from farms and comes locally from urban runoff.<\/p>\n\n

This nitrate and phosphate residue is invisible to people walking Dublin\u2019s quays but Jonathan sees its effect on the river\u2019s flora: \u2018effectively it fertilises the river. Those blooms of algae grow. They grow very fast, and then they die off. And the secondary effect is that the ecosystem gets hammered.\u2019 This he thinks is \u2018a ticking bomb.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Nonetheless, \u2018 Ireland has never had heavy industry. We\u2019ve never had coal or steel in any significant quantities, so we\u2019ve never had the slag and the downstream problems with that.\u2019<\/p>\n

Thus, unlike major rivers in other European countries, such as the Thames the Rhine or the Seine, which have had heavy industry situated along them for centuries, the Liffey doesn\u2019t have a long-term legacy of heavy metals or arsenic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Originally Jonathan\u2019s business found it far easier to get tourists onto their kayaks than to get Dubliners on board.<\/p>\n

He now recognises that \u2018Dubliners were always looking at the river and thinking it was filthy.\u2019<\/p>\n

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But drawing attention to the problem of litter was a double-edged sword:<\/p>\n

The last thing we needed to do was reinforce the bad reputation the Liffey had as a dirty river. There was a lot of litter, but litter in itself doesn\u2019t make for bad water quality. It\u2019s just litter. It\u2019s like saying that the soil is bad because there\u2019s rubbish on the surface. It doesn\u2019t necessarily make sense. So we never spoke about it. We never tweeted about it. We never put pictures of it out. It\u2019s only recently we\u2019re kind of confident enough that the city’s attitude has changed to the water, that we can say, you know what, collectively we can clean it up.<\/i><\/p>\n

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused an abrupt drop in tourism and City Kayaking\u2019s business, but this period also sparked Dubliners into rediscovering the Liffey and their local green spaces. Jonathan says they\u2019ve seen more locals showing up to go paddling and it\u2019s a trend he wants to continue. He finds the global attitude has changed:<\/p>\n

The average Joe is much more environmentally aware than they used to be. They might not know exactly how to help, but they are still supportive of the idea of a sustainable environment. Floating the Liffey is an experience that brings things into focus \u2014 the beauty of nature alongside a few stray bits of litter, and our capacity to improve things. We\u2019re not just kayaking, we\u2019re opening minds.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In September 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency released<\/a> <\/span><\/i><\/b>a report<\/i><\/b><\/a> demonstrating that water quality declined nationally between 2016-2021. This included a downgrade in the ecological status of the Liffey estuary from \u201csatisfactory\u201d to \u201cmoderate\u201d due to phytoplankton, or algae blooms.\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

With thanks to Jamie Brunkow for editorial assistance.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan O\u2019Brien of City Kayaking says they began taking litter out of the River Liffey ten years ago. In that time he\u2019s seen a change in the river. City Kayaking was launched in order to offer people access to water activities in Dublin, but in the beginning there was a lot of what we used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":14887,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1710,2020,2684,2686,2983,2987,4441,4442,5008,5524,6867,7237,7873,7874,7875,8721,8922],"class_list":["post-14494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-city-kayaking","tag-covid-19-river-liffey","tag-dublin-city-council-river-liffey","tag-dublin-city-university-river-liffey","tag-environment","tag-environmental-protection-agency-river-liffey","tag-interview-on-the-liffey","tag-interview","tag-jonathan-obrien","tag-liffey","tag-or-algae-blooms","tag-phytoplankton-river-liffey","tag-river-liffey-clean-up","tag-river-liffey-litter","tag-river-liffey-phytoplankton","tag-styrofoam-in-the-liffey","tag-the"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}